The only one which springs to mind which might is one of Heinlein’s juveniles, Farmer In The Sky. My memory of it’s a little hazy, but I do recall discussion of stiff penalties for swatting insects—they having been imported for good reason, etc.

I’ve read around -just being curious- that navel oranges don’t need to be pollinated, while others like clementine mandarines need cross-pollination between different trees (wich I guess would be typycally done by bees). Am I wrong?

Nanahuatzin makes a good point. Honeybees are a subset of pollinators, not the whole group. They’re very efficient, and honey is a nice by-product, but the majority of the work on my farm is done by butterflies and bumblebees.

Honeybees are a subset of pollinators, not the whole group. They’re very efficient

European honeybees are not efficient pollinators. A gigantic paper that just came out showed, regardless of the honeybee density, as the density of wild pollinators increases, fruit set increases over a majority of crops across multiple continents. Honeybees can bring a ton of pollen, but they are not terribly good at getting it to where it needs to be to contribute to fruit set.

I couldn’t figure out why there were still oranges in the picture. Thanks for reminding me of navel oranges. I didn’t think of them because nobody grows them around here. Funny thing is that I see grapefruits in the picture too, probably from Texas. Are they mostly pollinated by sweat bees of the Halictidae family?

Honey bees do have limitations as pollinators for a couple of reasons, for one thing, unlike bumble bees, they’re not great at buzzing, which bees do to loosen pollen from the flower. The wild bee world is amazing, I’d encourage anyone to read up on them. It’s like immersing yourself in a real life children’s story with characters like wild hoary squash bee and the wild blue orchard bee, here in ontario alone there’s near 400 species of wild bee. Many of course at risk.

And it’s not just produce we stand to lose but all kinds of plants, trees, bushes, grasses. If it flowers chances are good it depends on wild bees. Where I live, without bees, there would be a lot of hungry cranky bears coming for our oranges.

Definitely check out the Xerxes invertebrate conservation society, they have a beautiful site and lots of info about bees. http://www.xerces.org/bees/

I think the assumption that no other insect would evolve to fill that niche of pollinating what bees currently pollinate is premature. In fact, there are probably insects already evolved that can do that, and will move in if the bees disappear. In fact, as a botanist with friends who are entymologists, I feel relatively comfortable that pollination would go on.

Again, this is not to minimize the problem of the bees. It’s just…well, evolution and all, you know. And the potential niche of many species is actually larger than the realized niche, so let’s be a bit more skeptical.

the big deal I think is an agribusiness problem both in the cause and the solution. It is true that there are many wild pollinators agriculture practice of using none selective insecticide and weed killer does not make an environment conducive to a very diverse insect population were other pollinators can thrive. The wild populations may not peak when the crop is flowering hence the practice of trucking in “migrant pollinators”
I doubt that the problem of hive collapse has one simple cause and answer. It seems to me that the balance is off. The thing that has changed is the growth of agribusiness which has its focus on profit in the same way most modern businesses are run often on more short term returns and not on sustainable really long term planing relatively speaking.

unlike in a Hollywood scenario this crash is more in slow motion, it is too slow for most people to notice until it is too late.
uncle frogy

If by some fell stroke every pollinating insect disappeared (and not just the European honeybee), it wouldn’t be pleasant, but most of us wouldn’t starve.

I count on mason bees and bumble bees to take care of my garden, personally. I keep a border of clover to tempt them in. I’ve also made little mason bee “houses” from holes drilled in 2x4s. I also don’t use pesticides, so that helps.

I know PZ started the trend by using the supermarket as an indicator of what we’d lose; however, do you not place any priority on biodiversity? Are you proposing that it’s OK if all this bad shit happens to all the ‘little’ creatures since humanity will survive, albeit in a changed and possibly less than hospitable world?

We are going to need a dozen or so whambulances here! We have a crisis. Multiple cases of virtual ‘slapped in face’ that need attending to. The rosy cheek of Freethought Blogs will return to its original colour in a few days time. Next time, I suggest you all stand beyond an arm distance length from organisations such as CFI, when you make your inflexible, obdurate, outlandish demands.

European bee populations are also declining, and so are some species of North American bumblebee. That data is often interpreted to mean that all of the world’s 20,000 bee species are in danger, and that we may be in the midst of a “global pollinator crisis.” But there’s little data to back up those claims, scientists say.

“When you look at what’s out there in the public press, the implication is that pollinators are all under threat, that there’s some kind of mysterious decline across the board,” says Sam Droege, a biologist at U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. “The problem is, there’s really no data to show that either way.”

While the domestic bee has taken all the atention, but seems some of the original pollinators of america are still there.